Morgan Spurlock is the documentary director behind Super Size Me (where we discovery if you eat McDonalds for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, you will get fat) and Pom Wonderful Presents: The Best Movie Ever sold (where we learn that product placement is a thing). His new movie is a little off the beaten path but it still has a gimmick – it’s called Rats and its a documentary about rats and how they live off our garbage and how we deal with them.
The gimmick is that it’s a horror documentary… it’s filmed with horror movie editing, lighting, music, and imagery. It’s trying to get under your skin and if you’re easily creeped out or have a phobia about rats, this movie will be disturbing.
I wasn’t disturbed and I wasn’t scared by all the tricks and gimmicks. But I was disgusted at the movie because it goes for shock value for no actual knowledge gained.
For example, the movie has a sequence in New Orleans showing scientists trapping Post-Katrina rats in order to dissect them and track their pathogens. So we get to see a rat autopsy where they harvest the rats organs, extracting tape worms and, ugh, a bot fly larva. Or watching a Vietnamese cook drown them, skin them, chop off their tails, legs, and head, skin them, butcher, and cook them. But the moment I finally just barked at my screen in disgust was a sequence in an English town where they show rat terriers ripping rats apart in order to clear out a farm.
Hey, I like a good gory movie when it’s fake and I guess I can handle real-life butchery is there’s a point. But there was no point to this. This was just real life gore for shock value. If the movie even was taking a position on whether this was good or bad, I’d at least be able to understand why it was being shown. But the documentary was just trying to be a horror movie so BLOOD! GUTS!
I guess that’s the one good thing about the movie though… it isn’t taking a position. There’s no narrator interjecting. It’s kind of a pure documentary in that way. But I’m not even sure what position they could have taken about rats. It basically tells us that there are a lot of rats living among us in cities around the world and people trap and kill them in unique and different ways. Except for in one Indian city where they have a temple where they worship them as our reincarnated ancestors. And that’s treated with the same level of horror movie editing and music.
It’s not a garbage movie in that it’s edited well and can be legitimately creepy. So it’s not the worst thing I’ve ever seen. But as a documentary, it’s simplistic in its message (lots of rats, people don’t like rats except when they do) and seems only to exist to icky. I’d just skip it unless you want to be skeeved out by a movie or you have a rat phobia and want to scare yourself (or a loved one).
Score: 67